The Word document contains VBA macro code to download and execute malware (downloader behavior). But MS Word contains protection features that prevent the code from running when the document is opened in Word.

First of all, since the Word document was downloaded from the Internet, it will be marked as such, and MS Word will open the document in Protected View:

The user is social-engineered into clicking the Enable Editing button. Because the Word document contains VBA macros, another protection kicks in:

By default, MS Word disables macros for documents of untrusted sources. Only after the user clicks on the Enable Content button, will the VBA macros run.

The user is presented with an empty document, but meanwhile malware was downloaded and executed invisibly to the user:

The VBA macro code can be extracted with a free open-source tool: oledump.py.

When looking at the VBA code (streams 8 and 9), we find subroutine Document_Open in stream 9:

This subroutine is automatically executed when Word opens the document. Subroutine Document_Open contains a call to subroutine TvoFLxE in Module1:

Subroutine TvoFLxE removes the content of the document (this causes the document to become blank, see screenshot), saves the document and calls function HuEJcCj.

In this function we see a call to CreateObject. This is always interesting and requires further analysis. CreateObject takes a string as argument: the name of the object to be created. In this code, the string is returned by function JFZzIeCKcjgPWI which takes 2 arguments: 2 strings that look like gibberish. We see this often in maldocs (malicious documents): strings are obfuscated, e.g. made unreadable. Function JFZzIeCKcjgPWI is a string decoding function, taking strings “MWqSBYcnRrviVpGRtY.ASJhGneqYlVl”and “FYqRnVNvJB1GqMA” and converting them to a meaningful string.

In this maldoc, the string obfuscation method is rather simple. Function JFZzIeCKcjgPWI removes all characters found in string “FYqRnVNvJB1GqMA” from string “MWqSBYcnRrviVpGRtY.ASJhGneqYlVl”. Was is left is string “WScript.Shell”. This Shell object can be used to make Windows execute commands. So we need to deobfus.

When we deobfuscate these strings, we get this PowerShell command:

This PowerShell command downloads an executable (malware) to disk and executes it. The downloaded malware seems to be ransomware, we’ll write another blog post if it has interesting features.

To protect yourself from this kind of attacks, never activate the document (Enable Editing and Enable Content). Anti-virus can also protect you by 1) detecting the maldoc and 2) detecting the executable written to disk. When you don’t trust a document, you can always upload it to VirusTotal.